


slow dance through these summer nights

by astrolesbian



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, kind of canon divergent but mostly just gay, this is so self indulgent sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 06:53:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6556066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrolesbian/pseuds/astrolesbian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>three times bitty almost tells jack he loves him, and one time jack beats him to it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>(so i was like, what if jack wasn’t interrupted on that phone call. because i love to die.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	slow dance through these summer nights

**Author's Note:**

> check please! saved my crops, cleared my skin, and freed me from capitalism. please enjoy

Bitty falls back into the chair, clutching his phone to his chest because it’s what’s left in his hands, and slowly lowers it into his lap, his heartbeat pounding in overtime. 

His phone buzzes, with a text from Jack.

Jack, who just kissed him. Who just ran in here looking all frustratingly blue-eyed and disheveled from running and his tie a little crooked, and then kissed him, out of the blue. Jack, the cause of his suddenly accelerated heartbeat.

Their mouths had touched.

(So had their tongues, but that was a whole other can of worms that Bitty wasn’t going to open just yet, thank _you_ very much.)

_sorry it took me so long_ , the text reads, when his hands stop shaking enough to unlock his phone, and suddenly Bitty’s entire body just feels too full of warmth and sweetness to even move, much less to text back. It’s not a dream, he thinks. Jack is still Jack, awkward at texting and apologizing for things he really doesn’t need to apologize for, and being Jack just apparently comes with barging in and kissing Bitty now, and he won’t complain. He’s just glad he’s not dreaming.

He hugs the phone to his chest and smiles. 

_have to admit, i almost thought i hallucinated that,_ he writes back.

_you didn’t. i just wish i’d done it before._

_oh, honey,_ Bitty writes, _you don’t have to apologize. the guy i had a stupid crush on just kissed me goodbye. seems like a good deal on my end._

_stupid crush?_

Oh, lord.

_kind of,_ he settles on. _i didn’t think anything would ever come of it._

_and now?_

_now it’s still a crush,_ Bitty says. _just not so stupid anymore._

Jack doesn’t write back for about half a minute, and Bitty spends the whole time panicking.

_i wish i didn’t have to leave,_ Jack says, finally, and Bitty’s heart thuds unevenly, and he wants to say — however stupid it would make him sound — _i love you._ Because he does, he thinks. Jack has been a constant for the past year, and it feels like every time they’ve spoken Bitty has just been falling for him harder and harder.

He glances back down at his phone. _when can we see each other again?_ Jack has written, and Bitty smiles.

_you could come to georgia for the 4th,_ he says. 

The response is almost immediate. 

_i’d like that._

A second passes, and then his phone beeps again.

_a lot. i’d like that a lot._

 

They start Skyping, a lot.

It’s weird getting used to this — even weirder because he’s missing Jack at the same time that he’s worried he’s being too clingy, and that the endearments he used to use absentmindedly now seem like they have to mean something else now, something more. Jack used to be a knock away, across the hallway, or maybe a few minutes away if he had a class. Jack used to be doing homework in the kitchen as Bitty baked, or watching a history documentary as Lardo quizzed Bitty on biology, and the weirdest part is getting used to being without him, as strange as that sounds when Bitty thinks about explaining it out loud. 

He talks to Jack enough on Skype that it becomes regular, almost unspoken — every night at around nine, he’s either calling Jack or receiving the call. To his delight, he gets to witness the slow return of Jack’s accent, which gets stronger and stronger every day since he’s been mostly speaking French with his family. Bitty’s sure that his own twang is worse than ever, and occasionally winces when he drops too many _y’all’s_ in conversation, but he supposes that Jack has never minded before, so he must not mind now.

It doesn’t hurt that Jack smiles at him sometimes like he can’t believe any of this either, and it leaves butterflies creeping through Bitty’s stomach.

“Mama asked me what I was doing cooped up in my room all night,” he groans one night, burying his face in his hands. “I just didn’t know what to say! I said something about the team and you and trying to keep in touch, but I just went all flustered, it was a _mess,_ oh Lord.” He peeks out through his fingers, and Jack is laughing, in the soft chuckling way that means he’s trying not to let Bitty notice. “Well, it’s not as if I could have said, ‘oh no, Mama, I’m just up here talking to my boyfriend’, could I?”

“Boyfriend?” Jack says, and Bitty sits straight up, the blood rushing to his cheeks.

“I mean!” he fumbles. “I mean, I just meant, um, well —”

“I like that,” Jack says, and he’s grinning, so softly, that Bitty’s heart does backflips. And, ridiculously, Jack reaches out and touches his fingertips to the screen, leaving them there. “Boyfriend.”

Bitty laughs, and he’s sure he’s still blushing like a fool, but he reaches out, too. “Boyfriend.”

Jack’s eyes are so soft. “Eric Bittle is my boyfriend.”

“Oh, Lord,” Bitty says, and he has to bury his face in his hands again. “Jack Zimmerman, you do know how to make a boy blush.”

His heart pounds in an unsteady rhythm, and he hears Jack say _“Bitty,_ ” and he looks up again to see Jack smiling at him, his hand still resting absentmindedly on the screen. 

“Maybe I think you’re cute when you blush,” Jack says, and Bitty fights the urge to bury his face in his hands again.

“I miss you,” Jack says, then. “I wish you were here.”

“Oh,” Bitty says, his heart thudding. How do you respond to something like that?

He almost says _I love you, Jack,_ but swallows it at the last second. If _boyfriend_ sounded too fast, even if Jack didn’t care, then an _I love you_ would _definitely_ be too fast. 

“I miss you too,” he says, instead. “I can’t wait until July.”

He reaches out and touches the screen, angling his fingers over Jack’s, and they smile at each other, and everything is okay, for a second.

 

“Come on,” Bitty whispers, shaking Jack awake. It’s July 5th, or maybe 6th by now, and the clouds from the morning have slid away, leaving the stars and moon hanging low in the sky. Bitty sat awake for a minute, staring out his window, Jack’s hand hanging down off the bed so he could hold it. (He’d insisted Jack take the bed, because he was going to be a good host, damn it.) But now he’s too awake to sleep again, and he can’t help but wonder if Jack has ever seen the night sky like this, the moon so close you could touch it.

“Mm?” Jack says, blinking awake, and Bitty kisses his cheek. Seeing Jack half-awake has been one of the best things about this visit.

“I’m gonna take you out, Mr. Zimmerman,” he says. “After tomorrow I’m not gonna see you for weeks. I intend to make the most of it.”

Jack grins at him sleepily. “Are you?” he says, and Bitty has to kiss him, when he looks like that — his hair a mess and his eyes so soft. 

Somewhere in the middle of the kiss Jack sits up, and Bitty ends up sitting on the edge of the bed, and Jack’s hands are under his shirt, and —

“Keep this up and we won’t even make it out of the house,” Bitty mumbles, and his voice comes out lower than usual, and Jack kisses his jaw. 

“Okay,” Jack says, and moves back, the sleepy smile still on his face. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” Bitty says, and kisses him again, quick and soft. Jack follows him when he pulls back, like a moth to a flame, and it’s incredibly flattering. Bitty grins. “Everything’s quiet in the middle of the night. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I’d go out to drive. Better than baking and waking up the whole house.”

“How old were you when you did this?” Jack asks, midway through tugging on pants. 

Bitty shrugs. “Fifteen, give or take,” he says. “Had to sit on the phone book. But I was always a good driver. No one minds unless you’re reckless.”

He leads Jack out to Coach’s pickup truck, grabbing the keys off the hook next to the back door. The sky is endless above them, and he drives, reaching over to grab Jack’s hand from the passenger seat. He keeps thinking about the past few days — the fireworks exploding over them, Jack’s pinkie finger linked with his; eating dinner with his parents; kissing in the pantry when Mama was out of sight. He’s gotten so used to sleeping with the sound of Jack breathing, and it’s only been four days. 

He’s absentmindedly following his old routine — driving slow until he gets to the back roads, and then rolling down the windows and speeding up, watching the dust cloud up behind them, watching the stars move by, and all the trees. Jack laughs, sticking his head out the open window into the night, and Bitty has to laugh, too, because they’re driving through Georgia in the middle of the night in Coach’s pickup truck, and Jack’s fingers are tapping out a nonsensical beat on his thigh, and he feels like he’s smack in the middle of one of those country songs he’d never admit he likes. 

Jack grins at him from the passenger seat, and he feels like he could fly.

“Are we stopping anywhere?” Jack says, and Bitty sticks his tongue out. 

“Wait and see.”

He waits until he finds a stretch of land with no trees, and tugs Jack out by the hand, and pulls him down into the grass.

“Look at all that,” he says. “You don’t see that just anywhere.”

Jack is quiet for a moment, and then he sighs — happily, Bitty thinks. “I want to show you the Northern Lights someday.”

“You don’t see those in Montreal,” Bitty says. “Do you?”

“No,” Jack says. “But, farther up — the places with less light poisoning. Like this. They’re beautiful.” His hand squeezes Bitty’s in the grass. “I wish you could see them. You’d love them.”

Bitty’s heart does the thing it’s been doing for a solid couple of months now, the thing that loosely translates to _oh, Jack Zimmerman, I think I might be in love with you._

He doesn’t say it. He supposes that after all this, at least a little of it must be implied.

The sky is endless, enough to make him pretend for a second that it's just the two of them underneath it, that everything he doesn't like about Georgia has faded away, replaced with this sky, and Jack, and how much Bitty loves him.

It's enough, he thinks, and kisses the back of Jack's hand. For now, this is enough.

 

“Okay,” Jack says, voice tinny over the phone. “Bye, Bits. Love you.”

Bitty has to sit down.

“Bitty?” Jack says.

“Oh!” Bitty says, and his smile is ridiculous, and he’s glad Jack isn’t here to see it. “I love you too.”

“Good,” Jack says, and Bitty can tell, just from his voice, that he’s grinning. “Bye, Bitty.”

“Bye, sweetheart,” Bitty says, and then says it again, just because he can. “Love you.”

He holds the phone to his chest and squeals.

Jack loves him.

He looks at the camera, which is still going, and grins at it. 

He has to go give the tadpoles a tour soon, and he can tell that Chowder is unpacking because there’s a lot of noise, and he still has to finish his vlog, but he ignores all of it for now, and falls back onto his bed, still holding his phone, feeling like an idiot.

His phone buzzes. 

_i know we’ve only been dating since graduation but i meant it. just so you know._

_This boy,_ Bitty thinks, dizzily.

_i meant it too,_ he says.

_good._

_good <3_

_good luck with the tadpoles._

_i’ll win them over. i win everyone over. ;)_

_make them a pie and they’ll be head over heels._

_there’s only one boy who i want head over heels for me, thank you._

_well, i have it on good word that he’s pretty into you._

_jack zimmerman, are you flirting with me?_

_i can stop._

_don’t. it’s cute._

_…i love you, bits._

_i am blushing so hard right now, jack zimmerman,_ Bitty writes. _i love you too._

 


End file.
